Asus a8n-e..

[chronokefka]

Originally posted by: sandeep108
I sort of second M0rph. I have had this motherboard since more than a month now, running quite a bit and I also do not notice much noise from the chipset fan. There are anyway lots of other fans making equal if not more noise. When it fails I will see. I run Asus Probe when I am not playing games, just to warn me in case it fails so there is no permanent damage.

All the new Rev2's have the new NB cooling solution. You'd be rushing to change the older ones when it suddenly decided to start spinnning at 9000+RPMs almost constantly. The noise level is quite a bit louder than 'acceptable'

 

[M0RPH]

Originally posted by: chronokefka

Originally posted by: sandeep108
I sort of second M0rph. I have had this motherboard since more than a month now, running quite a bit and I also do not notice much noise from the chipset fan. There are anyway lots of other fans making equal if not more noise. When it fails I will see. I run Asus Probe when I am not playing games, just to warn me in case it fails so there is no permanent damage.

All the new Rev2's have the new NB cooling solution. You'd be rushing to change the older ones when it suddenly decided to start spinnning at 9000+RPMs almost constantly. The noise level is quite a bit louder than 'acceptable'

My board is rev 2 and has the old type fan. The noise from the fan is perfectly acceptable to me. It runs at around 8K, which is fine since like I said, the noise is perfectly acceptable. If you want to get your panties all up in a bunch about replacing the fan, that's cool.

 

[chronokefka]

Originally posted by: M0RPH

Originally posted by: chronokefka

Originally posted by: sandeep108
I sort of second M0rph. I have had this motherboard since more than a month now, running quite a bit and I also do not notice much noise from the chipset fan. There are anyway lots of other fans making equal if not more noise. When it fails I will see. I run Asus Probe when I am not playing games, just to warn me in case it fails so there is no permanent damage.

All the new Rev2's have the new NB cooling solution. You'd be rushing to change the older ones when it suddenly decided to start spinnning at 9000+RPMs almost constantly. The noise level is quite a bit louder than 'acceptable'

My board is rev 2 and has the old type fan. The noise from the fan is perfectly acceptable to me. It runs at around 8K, which is fine since like I said, the noise is perfectly acceptable. If you want to get your panties all up in a bunch about replacing the fan, that's cool.

I myself don't care about the noise, seeing as I have 4 15+" floor/desk fans scattered around my room, there is no noise my PC makes that can drown those out...or my fridge...or rather broken Compaq laptop(which I sleep next to). If it ends up louder than the 20" beast blowing into my case, then I'll worry.

And I meant new as in the more recent Rev2 boards...as Sand mentioned having the board for over a month.

 

[sandeep108]

How does one make out whether one has the Rev 2 board? There does not seem to be anything on the box. Asus Probe in its DMI Explorer tab on the motherboard info states Rev. 2.XX. Does this mean I do actually have a Rev. 2 board? But I still have the old type fan. A friend who just a week ago bought a A8NE board does have the new fan. As chrono says, with the AC and other stuff running, a PC anyway can't be heard unless there is nothing else running in the room. My fan mostly seems to run at 8881 rpm and sometimes at 9375 rpm. If and when it fails I will worry about it.

 

[Marc in MN]

I felt I needed to replace it because for two reasons. First, it started spinning more slowly and setting off the BIOS chipset fan alarm everytime on startup. Second, it started failing to the point that I had to open the tower and manually spin the fan to get it moving when I started the computer (and then it would still spin slowly).

In short, it was failing in the way that they all seem to on this type of board. At any rate, it's already been replaced and seems to be working fine. ^_^

 

[pookguy88]

Can anyone give me some settings to start off with when I goto o/c my 3000+ Venice?
I'm not sure what all these HTT and Multi settings mean..
I thought the multipliers were locked on A64s?

 

[sandeep108]

Isn't it easier simply to use the built in overclock settings in the bios like 3,5,10%...? First time I am using AMD and have not overclocked much and hesitate to do so since otherwise the PC is quite fast and plays D3, Far Cry, etc. in single player mode quite well, at reasonable settings.

 

[chronokefka]

Originally posted by: pookguy88
Can anyone give me some settings to start off with when I goto o/c my 3000+ Venice?
I'm not sure what all these HTT and Multi settings mean..
I thought the multipliers were locked on A64s?

HTT is equivalent to the FSB on non-A64 chipsets. Increasing that overclocks the system. This was my first overclock, and I'm pretty happy with the results I got. To start, reduce the HTT multi to x3 to prevent the effective HTT from going over 1000MHz as that causes instability. Then drop the ram down to 200 to prevent it from being a stability issue as well. After that, just start pushing the HTT up in 5mhz increments until you can't boot into windows or POST. After that, you can push up the voltage to try and get a higher FSB. Keep going until you reach the limit and can't boot into windows. But make sure you watch the temps when you increase the voltage, as the chip WILL get hotter each step. Once you find the limit, back down a bit and start trying to Prime95 test. Use small or large FTTs and see if it goes error free for 12 hours or so. If you get an error, you will have to lower the HTT again until you can Prime for a decent lenght of time. This is your stable overclock. At this point, you can start pushing up the ram divider until it can no longer pass memtest, push your HTT multi up to get your effective HTT to as close to 1000 as possible(not that it really affects performance) and tweak your voltage to find the lowest value that you remain stable. Check out the guides posted around for futher details. And the A64s are all upwards locked, but you can still reduce the multi to try and get a higher HTT. I'm running 310x8.5 right now on a 3000+ Venice.

EDIT: Almost forgot...Set the PCI and PCI-e to 33 and 100 respectively. Don't want your hard drives to go corrupt on you.

Originally posted by: sandeep108
Isn't it easier simply to use the built in overclock settings in the bios like 3,5,10%...? First time I am using AMD and have not overclocked much and hesitate to do so since otherwise the PC is quite fast and plays D3, Far Cry, etc. in single player mode quite well, at reasonable settings.

The BIOS based overclock options may function, but most people here would probably rather be tweaking everything available to them in order to achieve the maximum performance they can with their current equipment.

 

[sandeep108]

Thanks for the detailed reply, chrono. I think I will wait for some time to try all this. Since this is my work PC as well, reliability, stability is more important. If and when a new game (i only game 10% of the time) does start stuttering, then I will read a bit more around here and try out overclocking.

 

[pookguy88]

Can I get a little help here. I just finished building and am in the middle of formatting my drive (Maxtor 200gb SATA). However, Windows XP Pro setup only detected 130gb. Am I doing something wrong?

I have the Asus A8N-E btw, and a 3000+ venice, if that matters.

 

[chronokefka]

Originally posted by: pookguy88
Can I get a little help here. I just finished building and am in the middle of formatting my drive (Maxtor 200gb SATA). However, Windows XP Pro setup only detected 130gb. Am I doing something wrong?

I have the Asus A8N-E btw, and a 3000+ venice, if that matters.

It's a problem with windows XP. Once you install at least SP1, you'll be able to partition and use the remaining space.
MS KB page here.

 

[sandeep108]

Originally posted by: pookguy88
Can I get a little help here. I just finished building and am in the middle of formatting my drive (Maxtor 200gb SATA). However, Windows XP Pro setup only detected 130gb. Am I doing something wrong?

I have the Asus A8N-E btw, and a 3000+ venice, if that matters.

I think I responded to a post like this post in the general hardware forum. Did you post there too?

 

[pedramrezai]

Hello everybody,I assembled my system 3 days ago using A8N-E,Venice 3000 &2x256 Crucial
value ram.I read the whole forum & I found only a few oc'ing advises.I had frustrating oc
and I was going to swap the mobo for something else;but suddenly today I figured out
something that changed everything dramatically.As I assembled my system I upgraded to 1008
and my best oc was 9x260=2340@1.45-mem@216@2.85-HTTx3-mem divider 333.
Anything further resulted in boot failure and automatic return of settings to deault.
Today I decided to do things step by step and I figured out 'THIS IS 266 MEM DIVIDER THAT
MAKES MY MOBO UNSTABLE';this might be the case in other owners of A8N-E.anyway,I increased
the fsb in 10mhz intervals and EASILY reached 300mhz AT DEAFAULT MULTIPLIER ! in other
words my system is working at 9x300=2700@1.45 and mem @232@2.9v.most important of all "IM AM
USING 2 CRUCIAL VALUE RAMS IN DUAL CHANNEL MODE USING 1T @466MHZ@2.9v QUITE STABLE" and my
tempratures are acceptable.As you may know there are not many board that can function at
300fsb and 1T command.I am quite happy with my system and I wish what I figured out will
help those of you with frustrating oc experiences with this board.

 

[sandeep108]

pedra: could you please list out your bios settings? and if I do not want to overclock as much as you have what could be somewhat less aggressive settings? TIA. I am somehow not able to understand exactly what you did either before or after. I did try to set my htt manually to something but the bios immediately rebooted and after that I have just left everything at default/auto. I did try the built in 5% overclock which worked, but did not seem to result in noticeable faster PC.

 

[pedramrezai]

Sandeep,I will describe it in detail: First,proceed step by step;do not change multiple
variables at the same time;change one variable,save setting,boot windows and if everything is ok proceed to change another variable.My mobo became unstable when I
was trying to set mem divider to 266 and proceeding step by step I discovered it and it might be the case for others.
I use the latest 1008 bios & my mobo is rev 2.00.
1)Set your HTT so that your HTTxFSB would not be over 1000.
2)Set ram voltage to 2.9
3)Relax your ram timing(eg,3,4,4,10)
4)If you have identical rams or dual channel kit enable 1T command as disabling it
signifficantly diminishes memory subsystem performance.
5)Overvoltage your cpu a little bit and disable C'n'Q.(QFan is harmless to overclocking)
(alas the board lacks other voltage settings but up to 300mhz fsb I found no problem)
6)Now the real challenge starts.it depends on luck,experience & your hardware.you have to scale fsb in 10mhz intervals and if the system is stable go for another 10mhz rise...
each time you increse the fsb look at the ran freq. as going too high over spd specs is a
common cause of instablity.it's also recommended to use sp2004 blend test to reassure
stablity.Wish you can go higher.last the name is Pedram.

 

[Faxtor]

I'm having the same problem as some of the people here.

I can't get my bios settings to stick in Windows. I flashed the bios to 1008 using the the command line. Tried resetting back to defaults, cleared the cmos, still no go. The settings actually only stick in the bios. Windows still has it at default.

I really don't want to use clockgen or Asus AI to set the o/c. Anyone have suggestions?

 

[sandeep108]

1)Set your HTT so that your HTTxFSB would not be over 1000.

So I first set HTT to x4, if I want to change CPU frequency to more than 200, right? Otherwise at x5 it will go above 1000?

4)If you have identical rams or dual channel kit enable 1T command as disabling it

Is it set to 2T by default or auto? If I simply make it 1T and leave the rest as it is would it be ok? I have Twinmos 512x2 running dual channel.

Now increasing fsb or cpu from 200 to 210, 220, etc. then will it not be inefficient since at 220x4=880 while 200x5=1000? So unless I can increase to >250 i.e. 260 and beyond, then only it makes sense? But then you say total should not go over 1000. Sorry but as I said I am somewhat of a newbie at overclocking and since my this PC my last new PC was over 2 years ago, so have sort of forgotten most of the techie speed stuff.

The guy who built this PC for me did say he overclocked it, pushed the ram to 3.0v did burn tests on it and also ran Prime95 for 2 days and it was rock solid.

Any changelog for 1008 bios? I am running 1006.

 

[pedramrezai]

Don't be affraid if fsbxHTT is under 1000.the bus is not so crouded to be fully saturated so
everything at 4x(even 4x by 200) is ok.It is safe to say up to 260 fsb provided you have
ram divider of 333 will not violate ddr400 spec so choose manual ram setting & set 1T
command and check with sisoft mem test to see the difference.I wonder why you use 1006?

 

[paulsg63]

Hi all... I have been following this thread for a while.
My rig is the A8N-E, Venice 3200.
I have mine running at 310x8, HTT=3, CPU=1.56V, 2 Buffalo sticks, 2:3 divider, mem=2.9V. And have been running the 1004 Bios.
Runs very stable.

I tried the BIOSes above 1004 and I have different issues.
1005 and above made the max CPU voltage 1.54v.
1008 only shows 301 FSB clock in CPUz, Nvidia Util, etc. Even if I set it at 310 or even 315?

Has anyone seen these BIOS isses?

I probably will stay with 1004... I just was wondering if It was me or somthing.

Thanks
Paul G

 

[sandeep108]

1006 was the latest non-beta bios available last time I had checked a few weeks ago. Since then work has kept me quite busy and still expected to really have not much time to tinker around for still a few weeks more or even visit Asus support site to see whether later bios available.

Since this is my primary work PC also, stability / reliability is of much more importance than overclocking, especially since everything is running rock solid and reliable at the moment and even Doom3, Far Cry, etc. very playable at high settings. I would need to do a complete backup before I even try flashing the bios. In case something does go wrong, I cannot afford to be stuck for even a day, the way things are currently. So I will check Asus site when I have some time and then update the bios and then try the overclocking you suggested when playing some games.

 

[porridJ]

I bought asus a8n-e last week, with amd athlon 64 3800xp x2, been working fine, i got service pack two on, and have been using it for everything
i upgraded something windows like...think it was a hotfix thing but dont know what that is...it restarted, once it restarted it froze on everything but the mouse, so i couldnt restart, so i pressed button to restart, it did memory test, beeped once, then did a load of beeps, it seems as though it cannot find my primary hdd, as it doesnt do the sound (which is very hard to describe) when i take the power away from the hdd

i cannot find anything on beep codes to do with asus and im sure ive looked through the book thoroughly, any help would be amazing, as i have lots to do but i cant even boot up

PSU 460 antec atx2
3800xp x2
768 ram (333)
maxtor ide hdd 80 (boot)
2x maxtor 160 sata on raid
geforce 7800

(oh and on that gcard, theres a power connector, with two molex connectors into one 6pin connector, am i mean to plug two molex cables into it or just one?)
cheers

 

[sandeep108]

Is it an older maxtor hdd? Can you run the maxtor diagnostics on it? Series of beeps? Normally it would beep once and display cannot find boot disk. If it is not even displaying the pci config screen, then try and check the bios settings. Very unlikely a windows update would cause something like this, most likely it could be a HDD failure. It also could also be your 7800 - check it's manual on how to plug in the molex / power connectors.

 

[porridJ]

ive have looked all over the internet about the graphics card thing...nothing...ok maybe not all but i spent about 2 hours looking and got fed up of finding the same thing...

well ive just spent ages getting my hdd out of my case cos that 7800 is a huge piece of kit, it is an older hdd but what do i do about diagnostics thing and why would it suddely stop?

it is saying cannot find boot disk but it takes about 10 mins for it to realise, where as if i take the power away it does it straight away

im gonna slave it onto this machine now, lets see what happens

 

[porridJ]

well...its the harddrive by the looks of it so sorry for posting on this forum, is it ok if i carry on or not?

i attached it to this computer and it made the same sound, and would let me boot up, even as a slave which is annoying...am i just to throw it and hope for the best??
cheers for your help

 

[zipz]

My computer with ASUS A8N-E motherboard gets a blue screen fatal error in windows XP sometimes. I have a 3000+ Venice and the motherboard is REV2.0 no idea which BIOS I have. Could a BIOS update solve my problem?

I have 2x512 Kingston ram in slot A1 and B1 (both blue slots).